Thursday, April 19, 2012

Just finished An Economist Gets Lunch, by Tyler Cowen, one
of my favourite bloggers. Here are my takeaways:

The key to finding good food is to look where
supplies are fresh, suppliers are creative, and consumers are informed.

The two things you can do to eat in the most
environmentally responsible way are to eat less meat and make fewer trips to
the supermarket in your car.

I do not like the word “foodie.”

This means that cuisine suffers where tourists are
plentiful, and my experience in Paris and Rome concur with this hypothesis.
Worldwide and I had better food in the countryside, perhaps because we didn’t
look too hard, or too far away from the attractions.

I enjoyed this book, but not as much as I had hoped.
Professor Cowen seems more like a collector or a detective than an epicure:
solving the puzzles and maximizing the number of experiences seem more
important than gustatory pleasure. I’d like to hear him talk with Anthony
Bourdain. I’m not sure they would enjoy each other’s company.